How to loop through dates and return a list of dates?

Question

hi,
thank you all for your help my all my oracle endaevors so far:)
I was going through PL/SQL Programming book by Oracle Press, but overall wasnt able to find the answer for the following.
I have a list of shops, simple: shop_name (table), date_holiday (table) that lets me keep dates that certain shop is closed.
example: shopID = 10
shopID 10
date_holiday 12/31/2009
shopID 10
date_holiday 1/1/2009
now, what I am trying to achieve is I am trying to get the list of days (formatted as MM/DD/YYYY, but thats not biggy) starting today and ending up in 3 months from now that will EXCLUDE all the holidays, example
select date_open ...... where shopID = 10;
[starting today]
12/29/2009
12/30/2009
1/2/2010
1/3/2010
[ending 3 months from today]
any simple ways or ideas that may help?
thank you!

Answer 1

somehow like this
select :the_shop shopid,the_day date_open
  from (select the_day,date_holiday
          from (select trunc(sysdate) + level the_day
                  from dual
                connect by level <= add_months(trunc(sysdate),3) - trunc(sysdate)
               ) d,
               (select date_holiday
                  from holday_table
                 where shopid = :the_shop
               ) h
         where the_date = date_holiday(+)
       (select nvl2(location_open1,'open,','mon,')||
               nvl2(location_open2,'open,','tue,')||
               nvl2(location_open3,'open,','wed,')||
               nvl2(location_open4,'open,','thu,')||
               nvl2(location_open5,'open,','fri,')||
               nvl2(location_open6,'open,','sat,')||
               nvl2(location_open7,'open,','sun') location_not_open
          from locations
         where locationid = (select shopid
                               from shops
                              where shopid = :the_shop
where instr(location_not_open,to_char(the_day,'dy')) = 0
    or date_holiday is nullRegards
Etbin